I like how you pointed out how the United States handled the Three-Mile Island incident, every country everywhere has handled some situation poorly. We tend to point those mistakes out more harshly in this class, I don’t know if it’s because we still have some of that Cold War mentality or if it’s just because we don’t have much favoritism for the Soviet Union.
Author: smaloney
Comment on We Have No Sex Here by smaloney
Prostitution is always an interesting topic to me, there’s always this focus on the woman who is the prostitute. Usually they try to depict the prostitute as immoral, or trapped in her position, or simply as an object. While it’s true that prostitutes are being paid for sex, men keep paying them, and if it’s immoral to have sex for money why isn’t it immoral to give money for sex? Most of these men who write against the “evils” of prostitution tend to ignore that whole side of the issue.
Comment on The lads of Liubertsy by smaloney
Pretty cool stuff, from your blog post though it seems like the Liubers were just looking for easy targets to beat up and rob. If the police aren’t willing to protect these western culture lovers, then the Liubers had little to no fear of retaliation of any sort. And if they’re selling the items they’re stealing instead of trying to destroy these western cultural item, it just makes the Liubers look like a bunch of convoluted criminals.
Comment on Countering the Counterculture by smaloney
Everything from the United States seems to be bourgeois propaganda, even if it’s not practiced by the bourgeoisie themselves. If you look at who was appreciating rock in the United States at this time, it’d be pretty difficult to describe them as the bourgeoisie.
Comment on Gopnik’s Galore by smaloney
It’s always interesting how different classes of people still tend to crop up in a communist society where there isn’t supposed to be any classes. And how in the case of these Gopniks and most other poorer classes the people around them don’t find issue with the economy, it’s always the poorer classes fault. Other people are succeeding still, it must be something wrong that the Gopniks are doing
Comment on Coon Rapids? by smaloney
Garst the owner of the corn farm apparently got mad eventually at all the people on his farm and kicked the reporters and everyone off his property, one reporter claimed to have Garst’s boot print on his back.
Comment on Coon Rapids? by smaloney
I wouldn’t call it a big reason for Khrushchev’s visit to America, but definitely one of the reasons. I know there was one account where Garst was visiting the Soviet Union and Khrushchev asked him to check on one of the collectivized corn farms. Garst was apparently displeased with how the farmers were spreading fertilizer and told them the correct way to do so, but they didn’t want to listen to some foreigner they didn’t know. Garst got pretty mad and threatened to report him to Khrushchev, that changed the farmer’s mind.
Comment on Coon Rapids? by smaloney
I don’t know how deep the relationship was between Garst and Khrushchev, there was the language barrier and the distance after all. But Garst made several trips to the Soviet Union while Khrushchev was in power and both men had a mutual respect of each other.
Comment on The Race to Space by smaloney
That is the pettiest deadline they could have set, one month before the Americans were going to launch a satellite. I never actually knew what Sputnik was for, besides proving that man-made satellites could be put into orbit. Do you know what signal Sputnik was transmitting?
Comment on Sputnik and the Space Race by smaloney
I still can’t get over the fact that they sent Laika into space with absolutely no chance of making it back down to Earth alive. Did anyone ask if Laika had survived the space flight, or did the Soviets just announce that they were the first nation to have a dog die in space?
